Multi-view fusion based on graph convolutional network with attention mechanism for predicting miRNA related to drugs

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play crucial roles in cancer progression, invasion, and response to treatment, particularly in regulating anticancer drug resistance and sensitivity. Identifying potential human miRNA-drug associations (MDAs) that manifest as resistance or sensitivity relationships offers valuable insights for cancer treatment and drug development. With the growing availability of biological data, computational methods have emerged as powerful tools to complement experimental approaches. However, limited attention has been paid to computational prediction of MDAs. Furthermore, existing approaches typically rely on known MDA information, overlooking the valuable insights available from multi-source data related to miRNAs and drugs. In this study, we present a multi-view fusion-based graph convolutional network with attention mechanism (MGCNA) to predict miRNA-associated drug resistance/sensitivity. Specifically, MGCNA integrates macro- and micro- level information of miRNAs and drugs to construct multi-view node features from different perspectives. The proposed multi-view graph convolutional network (GCN) encoder obtains miRNA and disease features from different views and learns adaptive importance weights of the embedding using an attention mechanism. Extensive experiments on manually curated benchmark datasets demonstrate that MGCNA outperforms existing baseline methods. Case studies of two common drugs further establish MGCNA's effectiveness in discovering novel MDAs.